archive of darkness · 2017-12-19 · 32 | african arts spring 2018 vol. 51, no. 1 archive of...

32 | african arts SPRING 2018 VOL. 51, NO. 1

Archive of Darkness William Kentridge’s Black Box

Ferdinand de Jong

all photos courtesy of the Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, except where otherwise noted

We have reached a point where all destinations, all bright lights, arouse mistrust.

that Black Box by William Kentridge has provided a forum for

the calibration of archival evidence and ethical considerations on

S William Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons (2014) reparation, reconciliation and forgiveness.

Black Box is a piece William Kentridge produced after he

ince the time the Holocaust was recognized as a

historical calamity without precedent, Germany

has publicly atoned for its history through offi-

cial apologies, financial reparations, and public

commemoration. While the Holocaust and the

transatlantic slave trade have been acknowledged

as crimes against humanity, atrocities perpetrated under German

colonialism slipped from public attention and were subject to

colonial aphasia. Ironically, the memorial politics commonly

referred to as Vergangenheitsbewältigung have obscured German

involvement in atrocities perpetrated in the colonies. Apart from

a memorial stone in Berlin’s Neuköln neighborhood and a reded-

icated statue of an elephant in Bremen, no permanent display

currently bears testament to the genocide of the Herero perpe-

trated in German South-West Africa.1 However, in response to

political demands by the descendants of the Herero victims for

recognition of atrocities committed and legal procedures for rep-

aration payments, Germany’s colonial past is receiving increased

public attention. In this context, the question arises what art can

contribute to the calibration and commemoration of colonial

pasts? This article examines the intervention of one work of art

in the public debate about Germany’s colonial past. It suggests

had been working on an interpretation of Mozart’s opera Die

Zauberflöte. Drawing upon the history of cinema, theater, and

opera, Black Box is a tightly packed play of automata that per-

form against a backdrop screen on which images are projected

to a haunting soundtrack composed by Phillip Miller. Lasting

for 22 minutes, the performance tells the history of the Herero genocide perpetrated by the German army in German South-

West Africa. Recasting Mozart’s Magic Flute as a shadow play

in a miniature theater, Black Box reflects on the opera’s associ-

ations with the Enlightenment. Illuminating its shadows cast in

the colonial encounter in Africa, Black Box revisits established

views on the Enlightenment as a project of human progress and

perpetuates a critical inquiry launched by the members of the

Frankfurt School.

Tellingly, the work is entitled Black Box/Chambre Noire. The

title references the camera obscura, the room of shadow plays that

served scientists since the second half of the sixteenth century

as a technology for the exploration of vision (Crary 1992). The

term chambre noire also references the main chamber of the ana-

log camera, through which light falls on the photographic plate,

but the title’s references are multiple and are not confined to the

field of vision. In aviation technology, the black box is a device

designed to record conversations of the flight crew in a cockpit.

Installed in anticipation of disaster, it is a technology to answer

questions about the operation of the aircraft when its pilots are

no longer alive to give testimony. Finally, the title also references

the black box theater as it was designed for experimental the-

ater pieces in the 1960s and 1970s. Typically, this kind of theater

was constructed to enable the audience to have a full view of the

stage and to break down the boundaries between performers and

audience. Referencing different technologies of vision, the piece

situates itself in a history of reflection on light and shadow and

engages with Plato’s allegory of the cave, which has served as a

pivotal metaphor for enlightenment since antiquity. In short,

Ferdinand de Jong is . [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

VOL. 51, NO. 1 SPRING 2018 african arts | 33

1 William Kentridge. 2005. Drawing for Black Box/Chambre noire, showing the German eagle ruling the world.

Black Box/Chambre Noire examines techniques that shed light on

what is cast in darkness and subjects to scrutiny how they affect

perception, an epistemological exploration appropriate to the

examination of forgotten histories.

Black Box uses a range of technologies to commemorate the

Herero genocide, perpetrated by the German army between 1904

and 1908 in what was then German South-West Africa (Fig. 1).

When Deutsche Bank commissioned a work by the South African

artist William Kentridge, it did not quite anticipate the occult

subject matter of Black Box.2 Exhibited in Deutsche Guggenheim

in Berlin in 2005, the moment of the work’s installation coin-

cided with an emergent public debate on Germany’s historical

culpability and its responsibility for reparation payments to the

Herero people. In a speech given at the centennial commemo-

ration of the Battle of Waterberg in 2004, the German Minister

for Development and Economic Cooperation, Heidemarie

Wieckorek-Zeul, had publicly acknowledged Germany’s moral

responsibility for the genocide. Although this statement did not

represent the position of the German government, its Foreign

Office confirmed in 2015 that “the 1904 to 1908 war of extermi-

nation in Namibia was a war crime and genocide.” Since then the

German government has negotiated with the Namibian govern-

ment over the terms and conditions of an official apology and

reparation payments, but such negotiations seem to have stalled.3

However, as expected, the admission of guilt fueled Herero

demands for reparation payments (Zimmerer and Schaller

2008:476).

In spite of its critical success, Black Box has not generated much

scholarly interest.4 This article proposes to situate Black Box in a

wider category of contemporary art that engages with the ghosts

of the colonial archive. In recent decades, artists-as-archivists

have started to explore the poetics of the spectral in an attempt

to work through the dark legacies of colonialism (Foster 2004;

Enwezor 2008; Spieker 2008; Buchloh 2009; Demos 2013; Garb

2013; van Alphen 2014; de Jong and Harney 2015; de Jong 2016).

Engaging a politics of temporality that go beyond a determined

future, their reassembling of archival images “functions as a pos-

sible portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future”


(Foster 2004:15). Such archival reassemblage has its historical

precedents, set in states of emergency, that retain their relevance

today. In its accumulation of photographic reproductions, Aby

Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–1929) was one of the first

modern attempts to construct an assemblage of reproductions

for future remembrance. Archival art has retained this reli-

ance on reproductions, even after Auschwitz (Didi-Huberman

2003). Archival images of trauma that were initially subjected

to a Bilderverbot have been reproduced and recirculated for the

purpose of transforming the spectator’s gaze (Guerin and Hallas

2007). Revisiting the past to reanimate a historical memory, Hal

Foster reminds us, the archival impulse is often directed at a

“recovery of the utopian demand” (2004:22).

Conventionally imagined as a technology for storing traces

of the past, the archive is thus reconceptualized as a site to

reopen the future. However, rather than provide us with more

linear metanarratives, the archive’s found objects enable artists

to work in nonlinear ways (van Alphan 2014:235–36). Indeed,

Foster (2004) has suggested that the fragmentation characteristic

of archival art rejects linear models. Digging through strata of

imperial debris, artists excavate colonial archives as construction

sites for new narrations. This article aims to demonstrate that

Black Box breaks new ground in animating archival fragments

and, through a multiplicity of techniques, affords an affective

engagement with the ghosts of the colonial archive.

2 William Kentridge. 2005. Projected image in Black Box/Chambre noire of a decapitated head mounted on a stand for scientific scrutiny. The image is projected from two opposed directions within the layered space of the miniature theater.

DRAWINGS FOR PROJECTION

Made of pinewood, the physical contraption of Black Box mea-

sures approximately two meters in height, width, and depth. The

box looks like a puppet theater, with a proscenium covered with

reproduced maps that carries the inscription “The Gazetteer of

Principles.” Adorned with cardboard curtains, the theater also

resembles a miniature opera house, and because the side curtains

are very roughly cut and resemble rock, the setting simultane-

ously invokes the shape of a cave. Puppet theater, opera house,

and cave, this theater hosts multiple temporalities that unfold

in their entangled performance. Within this miniature theater,

several rails facilitate the movement of automata performing different characters. Shaped as a sandwich-board man, rhinoceros,

skull, and a Herero woman, these automata engage in a shadow

play against a backdrop screen on which film images are pro-

jected. During the performance, a front screen is lifted to reveal a

stage that reveals another, transparent screen, onto which images


are projected by two digital projectors, placed in front and

behind the wooden contraption. Black Box is built up of several

screens and coulisses, creating a multilayered space extending

both inwards and outwards to the setting in which it performs

(Fig. 2). To synchronize the performance of the automata, music,

and projected images, the choreography is orchestrated through

digital technology, subjecting the mechanical puppets to the

discipline of the digital clock. As a highly sophisticated installa-

tion, Black Box’s technicality assists in defining its subject matter.

Staged in museums around the world, this black box also raises

questions about the role of cinema in the white cube.

With his signature technology widely

known as “drawings for projection,”

William Kentridge has established him-

self as one of today’s most innovative

artists. Understood as a particular filmic

practice, his technology consists of a

time-consuming process whereby the

artist drafts images that he reproduces

through photography. In his studio,

Kentridge draws a scene on paper, which

he photographs. The artist then changes

the drawing by erasing and redrawing

it, and makes another photograph. By

repeating this process, a series of photo-

graphs is produced which the artist turns

into a sequence to be projected as a film.

The process is not dissimilar to anima-

tion, yet distinguished from it in several

ways. First, rather than producing an

endless series of slightly different draw-

ings resulting in a moving image in which

the original process of making is effaced,

Kentridge works with a limited number

of drawings, each of which is reworked to

ensure that traces of the previous image remain visible in the new image, resulting in a palimpsest image

that shows its own erasures. By photographing a limited number

of such drawings, the illusion of a smooth transformation that is

achieved in animation is deliberately avoided. Drawing attention

to its own “erasures,” the resulting palimpsest distinguishes itself

from conventional animation through its ruptures and the reve-

lation of the process of its own making.

To be clear, this process relies both on the hand of the art-

ist and the process of mechanical reproduction, a technique

Rosalind Krauss has extensively explored for its obvious engage-

ment with the history of cinema and its function in the public

3 William Kentridge. 2005. Drawing.

4 William Kentridge. 2005. Cut-outs of heads illuminated with references to German public sphere and industrial culture for Black Box/ Chambre noire.


5 William Kentridge. 2005. Projected images of skulls and automaton on stage of Black Box/ Chambre noire.

sphere. Although Kentridge’s drawings for projection look back

at early black-and-white cinema and risk inducing nostalgia for

the lost promises of film’s utopian potential, she suggests that

his palimpsests aspire to reclaim that medium’s utopian possi-

bilities. Precisely because he employs outmoded technologies

for his drawings for projection, Krauss suggests that Kentridge’s

art “attempts to undermine a certain kind of spectaculariza-

tion of memory” as it prevailed in South Africa’s Truth and

Reconciliation Committee (Krauss 2000:29–35).5 Interestingly,

by transposing the problem of truth and reconciliation from

South Africa to Namibia and Germany, this article examines

how Kentridge’s images for projection address the issue of the

global circulation of models for reconciliation by providing a

very thoughtful response to it through revisiting the historical

debate on the utopian possibilities of cinema conducted between

Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin.6

A FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE

Because of Germany’s role in the extermination of the Jews

under the Nazi regime, its Vergangenheitsbewältigung (past mas-

tering) has focused on the Shoah. In the post-World War II era

Germany’s colonial past was largely forgotten and atrocities com-

mitted during its colonial history received scant attention. To recall

the obscured past of the Herero genocide, let us briefly review its

history and the role documents played in its perpetration. The col-

onization of the territory Germans named South-West Africa was

initiated by the Rhineland Missionary Society, eager to convert the

native population and lift their souls. To protect the interests of the

missionaries, the German army established in 1885 the protector-

ate Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika to support the conversion of colonial

subjects into enlightened Christians. The German government

also encouraged white settlement, expropriating the land of the

Hereros. To respond to their increased marginalization and the

manipulation of contracts about land reserves, the Herero chief

Samuel Maharero ordered an attack against the Germans in which

an estimated 130 Germans were killed. This incident initiated the

German-Herero War (1904–1908), which quickly culminated

in the inconclusive battle at Waterberg, after which the Herero

fled into the Omaheke desert. On their flight through the desert,

thousands of Herero died because their wells were deliberately poi-

soned by the German army.

The German Reichskanzler encouraged the survivors to sur-

render and ordered them incarcerated in concentration camps

(Konzentrationslagern), located in various parts of the country

(Fig. 3) (Gewald 1999:186). Famished and hunted like animals,

many Herero made their way to the camps, from where they were distributed as slave laborers to both civilian employers and

the German army. The conditions in the camps were atrocious,

echoing those in the British camps for Boer captives during the

Boer War and foreshadowing the conditions of the infamous

camps erected several decades later in Europe. Recording the

state of the starving population, the administrators of the camps

kept records to discriminate between those prisoners fit for labor

(Arbeitsfähig) and unfit for labor (Unfähig). The administration

also produced so-called Totenliste, lists recording prisoners’

causes of death as exhaustion, heart failure, bronchitis, or scurvy

(Gewald 1999:189).7 With hindsight, we can see that German

South-West Africa served as a laboratory for the bureaucratic

administration of death.8 The Herero genocide was the first geno-

cide recorded through bookkeeping: It raises questions about the

history of bureaucracy.

Towards the end of World War I, the Union of South Africa

invaded the German colony and called for an examination of the

German atrocities (Silvester and Gewald 2003:xxvii). Incoming

South African forces found files detailing practices of incar-

ceration in concentration camps and glass plate negatives that

displayed the flayed backs of victims exposed to “paternal cor-

rection” (Silvester and Gewald 2003:xvii). As a matter of urgency,

South African Major Thomas Leslie O’Reilly was ordered to

compile a report on the German treatment of its native subjects.

Published in 1918, the Blue Book blocked Germany’s attempts

to retain control over Namibia. However, although it contained

incriminating evidence, the Germans dismissed the Blue Book

as “a bulky bit of propaganda” and no German officers were

ever prosecuted (Silvester and Gewald 2003:xix). Moreover,

when the first all-white assembly for South-West Africa met in


6 William Kentridge. 2005. Automata on stage in Black Box/Chambre noire.

1926, it adopted a motion to destroy all copies of the Blue Book.

Throughout South Africa and Namibia, copies of the Blue Book

were systematically removed from public libraries because, as

Silvester and Gewald put it, “The dead of the Herero genocide

and other atrocities were dismissed and forgotten in the interest

of white settler reconciliation” (2003:xxxii). An archive of dark-

ness was summarily suppressed.

As in other colonies, German colonization resulted in a visual

economy in which images of “the primitive” circulated for

purposes ranging through scientific research and strategic geo-

politics (Hayes, Silvester, and Hartmann 2002). Black Box relies

extensively on this colonial archive of historical images, including

photographs reproduced in the Blue Book (Silvester and Gewald

2003:xxxii). One of the most shocking images incorporated in

Black Box is that of Herero men, stripped and lynched, hanging

from trees.9 Black Box also reproduces historical photographs of skulls removed from the corpses of Herero prisoners and sent to

Kaiser Wilhelm’s Institute for Physical Anthropology in Berlin

where, mounted on stands as material evidence for theories of

racial genetics, they served to demonstrate the superiority of

the German “race” over black Namibians (Geldenhuys 2007).10

However, the archive of historical images Kentridge draws upon

is not confined to the Herero genocide and explores other pos-

sible historical relationships. In Black Box, portraits of General

Lothar von Trotha and Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi are projected

alongside several anonymous skulls (Fig. 4). Cut in slices, both

horizontally and vertically, the projected images of the skulls of

the historical protagonists resemble and reference the photo-

graphic representations used by the forensic scientist Richard

Helmer to certify Josef Mengele’s death. When Mengele’s skull

was found in a graveyard in Brazil in 1985, the German scientist

Helmer developed a technology to identify this skull by superim-

posing portrait photographs of Mengele on photographs of his

skull (Keenan and Weizman 2012). The likeness this produced

was considered positive proof of Mengele’s death and provided

a new technology for the identification of skulls. In subsequent

legal research into the fate of the victims of political repression

in other Latin American states, the International Criminal Court

used this forensic technology to identify the skulls of activists

gone missing. Referencing the photographs made of Mengele’s

skull, Black Box captures various registers of research on human

remains and suggests that they were historically connected in

rather uncanny ways (Fig. 5). Superimposing historical images in

a palimpsest that references both classical works of art and foren-

sic aesthetics, the installation questions the binary oppositions

of victim versus perpetrator, art versus popular culture, vanitas paintings versus postmortem inquiry. Raising questions about

the ethics of these interrelated fields of research and represen-

tation, Black Box points to the ambivalences and ambiguities in

the scientific and judicial quest for truth, culpability, and justice.

Just as the projected images of the decapitated heads reference

the scientific research to which the inmates of the concentra-

tion camps were subjected, Black Box reproduces the Totenliste that the German army kept in the concentration camps.

Incorporating reproductions of these Totenliste, with names and

numbers crossed out, effaced, corrected, and reinscribed, these

palimpsest drawings reenact the body counts performed in the

concentration camps. Incidentally, the revisions inscribed on

these lists recall the revisionist debates about the actual numbers

of victims of the genocide that sections of the German-speaking

population of Namibia continue to contest today (Kössler 2008).

Engaging the debate on numbers, the aesthetics of the charts

drawn by Kentridge do not so much reproduce the accuracy of

bookkeeping as convey the artifice of counting—and the inher-

ent perversity of accounting for genocide. Projecting the names

of the victims on lists, Black Box follows the convention of list-

ing the victims’ names on memorials as it was established for

(European) victims of World War I. With the lists of names fad-

ing into the future, Black Box situates the viewer in the presence

of the dead, insinuating a temporality of future hauntings.


ARCHIVAL FRAGMENTS

The projected images in Black Box reference specific images

and texts in histories of art, science, biology, anthropometry,

cartography, and imperialism. Deliberately blurring the bound-

aries of established genres, Black Box also marches Surrealist

automata in its shadow play and juxtaposes Mozart’s arias with

a Herero lament (Fig. 6). The archive of documents that Black

Box relies on is vast and varied: I have extracted a few examples

from a long list of documents used by the artist, provided by

the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, which exhibited

Black Box in 2012:

• a photocopy of General von Trotha’s 1904 order against

the Herero people, from the Namibian National Archive

• Georg Hartmann’s map of South-West Africa, 1904

• private correspondence from German South-West Africa,

1911

• lists of mines and shares

• a French textbook circa 1868, La merveille de la science • a 1910 edition of the British handbook, Mrs. Beeton’s Book

of Household Management • a text on the relative value of gold coins

• an Italian ledger book, circa 1920

• a student’s handwritten lecture notes on German law, 1911

• a vintage street map of Johannesburg, 1940

• indices from French scientific notes

• Universale Tariffa, circa 1833

• Chamber’s Encyclopedia, 1950

• Introduction to Telephony textbook, 1934

• a 1924 copy of Cyclopedia of Drawing

• photocopies of advertisements featured in the German

journal Simplicissimus • share accounts of gold mines

• a Baedeker travel guide to Italy, circa 1900

In addition to these texts and maps, Black Box’s sound track

plays several excerpts from Mozart’s Magic Flute, including its

most famous arias from a 1937 recording of Sir Thomas Beecham

conducting the Berlin Philharmonic for the assembled Nazi lead-

ership. The music score also incorporates original compositions

by the Johannesburg-based composer Philip Miller, as well as a

fragment of a Herero lament, a traditional Herero praise song,

and traditional Namibian music for the musical bow. Miller’s

sound track reassembles fragments from different sound archives

in an uncanny encounter. Understood as an opera that celebrates

the spirit of the Enlightenment, the use of music taken from

The Magic Flute in Black Box is intended to set up a contrast.

As Kentridge himself states, “if The Magic Flute suggests the

utopian moment of the Enlightenment, Black Box represents the other end of the spectrum” (Kentridge and Villaseñor

2005:51).

7 William Kentridge. 2005. Cut-out of rhinoceros and drawn map, mounted on found document.


8 William Kentridge. 2005. Drawing of targets for a funfair shooting gallery, projected rotating on screen in Black Box/Chambre noire. The exhibition in the Deutsches Historisches Museum (2017) included a marksman target depicting a scene of herdsmen with their cattle that may have served as inspiration.

Some of these archival fragments have a straightforward rela-

tion to the Herero genocide, but others have been produced at

some remove from its direct context. With a sense for paradox,

Hartmann’s maps of German South-West Africa capture the

colonial incursions into African territories, while the 1910 edi-

tion of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management indexes

the sensibilities cultivated in the capital of the British Empire.

By including a wide range of documents, Black Box creates an

archive in which the sciences are presented as complicit in the

colonial project. Geography, for instance, emerged as one of the

sciences that used the colonies as a theater for its investigations

(Dirks 1992:6). Not only was the space of the colonies thereby

appropriated for a European project, Europe’s Enlightenment

was in fact conceived in relation to the allegedly primitive pop-

ulations that inhabited this space. Indeed, the Enlightenment

trope of progress was rooted in a comparison between the

enlightened institutions of Europe and the subject populations

of the colonies that allegedly lived in a state of Nature (Withers

and Livingstone 1999:14). During the eighteenth century, the

map was regarded as the epitome of encyclopedic knowledge,

serving the Enlightenment’s self-image of rationality by positing

the colonial space as one to be rationalized (Edney 1999:173). The

production of geographic representations in the eighteenth cen-

tury legitimated a particular social order (Edney 1999:165). Black Box incorporates several maps that serve as foils for the reen-

actment of scientific explorations, such as the projection of film

footage of a rhinoceros trophy hunt on a cartographic substrate.

In a disproportionate size, the place name “Berlin” is written

over the map of South Africa, no doubt to remind the audience

that in 1884–85 Europe’s colonial powers assembled at a confer-

ence in the German capital to divide up access to the continent’s

territories.

Interestingly, none of the footage or documents reproduced

in Black Box is rendered in its “original” form. As drawings for

projection, they are the products of both draftsmanship and

mechanical reproduction. It is important to emphasize that these


drawings for projection obliterate the distinction between “orig-

inals” and “copies”—as the process of transmission depends on

reproduction. Documents that have served as the substrates for

the drawings for projection in Black Box are displayed in glass

cases in the gallery space in which Black Box is staged (Figs. 7–

8).11 Turning documentary evidence into an object of aesthetic

contemplation, Black Box questions the authority of histori-

cal documents and the role they have played in the colonial

encounter, not by presenting more “truthful” documents, but by

interrogating their role in the authorization of genocide (Demos

2013:60). As self-proclaimed fabrications, these “documents”

draw attention to their historical conditions of possibility. By

incorporating both official, historical documents and contempo-

rary Herero laments that remember the “darkness” of genocide,

Black Box goes beyond the verification of artifacts towards an

inquiry into the very structures of transmission of trauma.12 Black Box is not an archive of authentic documents of the Herero geno-

cide, but an archival simulacrum that investigates the conditions

of possibility of genocide and its remembrance.

In its archival exploration, Black Box explicitly questions the

authority attributed to writing, print, and the dissemination of

documents in the imperial public sphere. Inserting the docu-

ments of death into a wider archive of arts, science, and visual

culture, Black Box provides an epistemological context for the

Herero genocide. Such a wide range of documents recall the

conditions of possibility Michael Rothberg has delineated for

the making of multidirectional memory. In his thoughtful and

highly acclaimed study on multidirectional memory, Rothberg

claims that the spread of Holocaust memory and consciousness

around the world has set the stage for a competition between

different victimage memories. However, such memories need

not necessarily be in conflict, and Rothberg suggests that the

acknowledgment of Holocaust memory has in fact enabled the

articulationof other histories of victimization(2009:6). His model

of multidirectional memory proposes that memories and com-

memoration of the slave trade, colonialism, and the Holocaust

have actually enabled each others’ recognition beyond national

identifications and narrow political affiliations. Following this

argumentation, one might ask whether the Herero genocide

also owes its recognition to the multidirectionality of Holocaust

memory. However, as I have argued throughout, Germany’s

Holocaust Vergangenheitsbewältigung has in fact obliterated

engagement with its colonial history. Only after the completion

of the process of German unification did some space for public

debate on this subject emerge, even though public interest in it

remains restricted to this day. Nonetheless, the public acknowl-

edgment of different victimage memories proceeds apace in a

process that is truly multidirectional in Rothberg’s sense. For

instance, German diplomatic demands that Turkey acknowledge

the Armenian genocide have instigated retorts from the Turkish

government demanding German acknowledgment of the Herero

genocide (Zimmerer 2016). Genocides committed in the Age of

Empire are subject to political negotiations between successor

nation-states that may favor national “forgetting,” but historians

working on the Herero genocide have established that Namibian

and German pasts are intricately entangled and acknowl-

edge that its commemoration, too, is interdependent (Kössler

2008:314, 2015; Zimmerer 2008; Eckert 2016; see the bibliogra- phy in Kössler 2015[?] for more extensive discussion in German).

To demonstrate such entanglement of history and memory, the

archival documentation required is of course not to be found in a

single archive. Rothberg argues that, “Far from being situated—

either physically or discursively—in any single institution or site,

the archive of multidirectional memory is irreducibly transver-

sal; it cuts across genres, national contexts, periods, and cultural

traditions” (2009:18). Here, I have demonstrated that Black Box mobilizes such a transversal archive for the remembrance of

the Herero genocide in multidirectional commemorations. By

including maps, shares of mines, technologies in eugenics, and

the forensics of Mengele’s skull, Black Box’s archival fragments

demonstrate transversal forms of objectification and enter unex-

pected conversations with other specters of the Enlightenment.

9 Installation view of Black Box at Deutsche Guggenheim, 2005. Photo: Mathias Schormann


10 William Kentridge. 2005. Collage including cut-outs of automata megaphone and sandwich-board man.

BLACK BOX/WHITE CUBE

In Black Box, Kentridge transposes his signature technique

onto a new set of media. Situating itself in histories of opera,

installation art, cinema, popular theater, and forensics, the

piece raises questions about screens, exhibition space, site-spec-

ificity, spectatorship, and spectrality. Any analysis of Black Box has to privilege a particular genealogy of the work over others

that might be equally justified, and an evaluation of the work’s

accomplishments will be inflected by this choice. As a multi-

media work, it distances itself from modernist media-specificity

and intervenes in debates about intermediality and the cross-

over between media. This is particularly apparent in the way in

which the work situates itself in parallel genealogies of screen-

based installation art and post-cinema. This particular art

form that, says Alison Butler, “cannot quite articulate its name”

(2011:531), is situated between the history of experimental art

studied by art historians and expanded cinema studied by film

theorists. It is a field mined with opinions entrenched in sep-

arate critical histories. In this minefield, Black Box addresses

the debate about the illusionary nature of cinema and its anti-

illusionary critique as it has set the parameters for the entry of

cinema into the gallery space.

The art form without name examines the site-specificity of the

screen in the “post-medium condition” where moving images

have become ubiquitous and their materiality has taken many

forms. In this respect, the complexity of Black Box as a multime-

dia installation and its multiplicity of frames and screens merit

some attention. With projectors situated both before and behind

the box, the installation’s moving images are projected on pro-

scenium, coulisses, front, and back screens. Double projection is

of course well established in cinematic art, having its origins in

a genre of screen-based artworks that posited the cinematic pro-

cess itself as object of investigation (Trodd 2011; Uroskie 2014).

Screen-based installation art of the 1960s and 1970s grappled

with at least three screen spaces simultaneously: the space behind

the screen, the space before the screen, and the spatial presence

of the screen itself. In her discussion of Michael Snow’s seminal

work Two Sides to Every Story (1974), Kate Mondloch observes

that “to experience the piece fully, viewers must perambulate

around the projection surface and explore the screen-based spa-

tial environment from both sides” (2011:82).

With its set pieces and multiple screens, Black Box invites the

audience to do the same. However, while Black Box performs

its 22-minute play of projected images, the audience is immo- bilized in their chairs and cannot get up and view the screen

from two sides. When film footage of bush foliage—recorded at

Waterberg, one of the principal arenas in the German-Herero

war—is projected from different directions onto screen and

proscenium, the projected images produce illusions of ghostly

presences. Restricted as seated spectators, viewers must content

themselves with these specters as they appear on the transpar-

ent screen, and they are left to wonder how these illusions have

been produced. The reverse of the screen remains inaccessible,

hidden, and conceals its secrets (Cassar 2008). While the screen

shows us the specters of Waterberg, an automaton representing

a Herero woman strides across the podium lamenting her losses.

Light reflecting from the screen permeates her translucent dress,

revealing a spring for her skeleton.13 Meanwhile, the sound track

reproduces sung laments that constitute the form through which

the Herero remember the atrocities of their annihilation. The

songs remember that those who survived the annihilation had

no time to bury their dead and carried with them the “darkness

of death” on their flight to Botswana.14 A Herero lament is played

that hints at this trauma, but instead of rendering the unspeak-

able intelligible no translation is offered: Black Box only projects

shimmering shadows of bush foliage. Although Black Box lifts the

historical curtain it does not provide easy access to the historical

reality of the genocide and its afterlives, but through illusionary

tricks creates impressions of overwhelming loss and returning

specters. Exploring the potential of projected images, Black Box


in fact probes the limits of representation and engages with the

call to move beyond the binary oppositions of cinematic illusion

and anti-illusionism. It reenacts for its viewers the experience

of prisoners shackled in Plato’s cave, but in this case, although

they remain incapable of piercing it, the viewers know they are

watching an illusion. As an installation piece, Black Box provides

a full experience of the screen by projecting illusions—empha-

sizing the impossibility of piercing these illusions. Rejecting a

Brechtian refusal of illusionism, Black Box mobilizes a positive

contribution from the cinematic illusion in a black box, explor-

ing, as Kentridge states, what can be clarified through shadows

(Kentridge and Villaseñor 2005:51).

After the performance of Black Box, the lights switch on and

the audience can walk around the miniature theater and inspect

the structure, paying close attention to its mechanics.15 The

moment at which the audience is released from its seats repeats

the moment in Plato’s parable when the prisoners are released

from their shackles. Exposed to the mechanics with which they

have been deluded, this revelation should now lead to their

enlightenment, but they find themselves in a white cube, bur-

dened with the memory of Black Box. In the exhibition room

are exhibited the documents, the collages, the maps and mon-

tages, the automata that Kentridge has used for the making of

his shadow play. Like the viewers of other screen-based art, the

11 William Kentridge. 2005. Drawing for projection of rhinoceros alongside automaton of megaphone in Black Box/Chambre noire.

audience is invited to examine the materiality of Black Box and

the drawings that have served to produce its illusions. Walking

around the exhibition space, the audience becomes witness to the

artistic process and is invited to position itself in relation to the

projected images on screen. Mondloch (2011:84) observes that in

such installations the screen itself is an object and a window at

the same time. Spectators are asked “to see double” and realize

that there are “two sides to every story,” resulting in a “double

consciousness” of the experience of the Black Box theater and the

objects on display (cf. Uroskie 2014:2).

A quick tour through the gallery enables viewers to recognize

several of the drawings on display as the constituent elements


of the projected images (Fig. 9).16 But in spite of occasional rec-

ognition, it is impossible to reconstruct the intricate, technical

process whereby this archive of still images has been transformed

into moving images for projection. Indeed, the spectator cannot

quite fathom how the “documents” on display have been trans-

formed into the cinematic “illusions” she has just witnessed.

Which of these drawing have been used? Which have been dis-

carded? Which voices have been privileged and which silenced?

How has this filmic structure been arrived at? Reproducing the

quandaries of genocide reconstruction in fiction, the work of

art reenacts the aporias of traumatic memory and precludes a

proper understanding of the process, preventing healing and clo-

sure. The exhibition invites a reflective engagement, one in which

the process of cognition is not a rationalist movement from the

darkness of Black Box to the bright light of the white cube, as the

order of visitation is not prescribed. One may visit the exhibition

before watching the cinematic images of Black Box, exploring

the possibilities of enlightenment through cinematic illusions,

or vice versa, exploring the illusions of enlightenment through

fabricated, would-be documents. The seemingly irreconcilable

logics of the black box and the white cube are thus brought in

dialogue, inviting the spectators to think about fact and fiction

and acknowledge the illusions of shadow play while taking on the

burden of memory. Moving backwards and forwards as in a work

of mourning, the public can intimate the tragedy of the Herero

genocide and reflect on its own amnesiac memory.

Situated in a white cube, Black Box accentuates the antin-

omies between cinema and the art gallery, sites of display that

have their own histories of spectatorship and criticality. Black Box revisits these antinomies, creating a third space for per-

ception. In this hybrid space, this Gesamtkunstwerk enables the

articulation of affect and Trauerarbeit in ways unsupported by

conventional media. Black Box turns on site-specific associations as its performance opens itself up to the gallery it is exhibited

in. For example, the exhibition in the Jewish Historical Museum

in Amsterdam afforded multidirectional associations touching

on traumas beyond those of colonial history. Made by an art-

ist of Jewish descent whose family moved from Lithuania to

South Africa and presented in a former synagogue in a former

Jewish ghetto, this archive of darkness recalled Nazi razzias in

Amsterdam, and elsewhere. Devoid of a linear historical narra-

tive, the affect of loss that Black Box produces is site-specific yet

translatable to other times and places. Through statements of

empathy and atonement, visitor testimonies attest that Black Box touches on multiple traumas.

ANIMATING THE ARCHIVE

After the cinematic projection of rapid sequences of simulated

violence, the archival excess that Black Box presents provides

an experience that is not available for narration and requires a

proper “working through.” The performance closes with an Elegy

for a Rhinoceros, a recurring protagonist in Kentridge’s work.

Initially the rhinoceros is projected in archival footage of a colonial trophy hunt, in which the killers saw off its foot as a souvenir,

an image juxtaposed with Sarastro’s great aria to peace, In diesen

heil’gen Hallen (in these sacred halls). In the final scenes, the

rhinoceros returns dancing on its hind legs and meets the autom-

aton megaphone man carrying a cardboard stating, Trauerarbeit (Fig. 10). In this meeting of the rhino with the sandwich-board

man, it is not hard to see Germany’s colonial history meeting the

nation’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung. After a light-hearted danse

macabre to the tune of a Berlin waltz, the rhinoceros makes a

somersault and disappears in the coulisses as if the excessive

violence we just watched was only a circus act. The dance of the

rhinoceros reenacts the parade of Clara, the rhino that toured

Europe as an exotic exhibit in the mid-eighteenth century (Fig.

11).17 Reenacting this history as traumatic repetition, the rhinoc-

eros returns like a specter that has come to haunt us. Indeed,

Black Box is full of such revenants: General von Trotha, rein-

carnating Mozart’s Sarastro; the Queen of the Night, returning as

wailing Herero woman; skulls hidden in museums in Berlin

repatriated to the Herero.18 Elusive materialities, these specters

stumble from the back stage of this shadow theater like so many

shadows on a surfeit of surfaces, demanding recognition, restitu-

tion, and reparation.

As a black box situated in a white cube, Black Box projects a

shadow play on multiple screens. Exposing the doctrine of cog-

nition through exposure to light to critical scrutiny, Black Box explores the possibilities of cognition through shadows that illu-

minate (Kentridge and Villaseñor 2005:51). In a phantasmagoria of

silhouettes, shadows, and specters projected on transparent

screens, Black Box provides the scene for a haunting Derrida has

identified as proper to our age or mourning.19 To understand how

Black Box enables the observers to come to terms with Germany’s

colonial past, it may be useful to revisit Kentridge’s studio as site of

investigation. To make his drawings for projection Kentridge

repeatedly moves backwards and forwards between the draw-

ing on the wall and the viewfinder of the camera, performing a

time-consuming labor. His production of superimposed images

for projection on screen requires an ambulatory movement,

which turns the studio, as Kentridge states, “into a machine

for the alteration of time.”20 Replicating this movement in its

observers, Black Box enables Trauerarbeit in the ghostly archive of

colonial genocide, turning spectators into witnesses (Bennett

2005:35). In a logic of the spectral, Black Box enacts a “redemp-

tive return” whereby archival material, as Kobena Mercer says,

“instead of being dead and buried in the past, flashes up into con-

temporary time in a critical moment of delayed awakening that

reveals the unfinished afterlife of the colonial relation” (quoted in

Demos 2013:67; cf. Baer 2005:14). Exploring the temporality of

Trauerarbeit, Black Box has made a significant contribution to the

utopian potential of archival art by enabling mourning in an

archive animated by colonial specters.

Black Box blasts the past into the present, animating an archive of images through transformation, rather than narration.21 In a

complex political and legal context in which claims for repara-

tions have been articulated but not granted, the skeletal remains of a

slain people reappear as ghosts demanding justice. Addressing

questions of moral guilt and political debt, Black Box provides an

archive for the calibration of conflicting demands for justice, rep-

aration, and reconciliation. In the year in which the monumental

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated in

Berlin, commemorating the Holocaust with 2,711 concrete slabs or

“stelae,” Black Box’s projections of specters complemented and

commented upon Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung by

presenting an ghostly archive to counter colonial aphasia. This

archive, however spectral, reminds us of Derrida’s injunction “to

learn to live with ghosts but to live with them justly” (1994:xviii).


Notes

1 Since the start of the centenary commemora-

tion of the German-Herero war (1904–1908), more

attention has been given to the Herero genocide and

German colonial history in the German public sphere.

In 2016 the German government announced that it

intends to offer public apologies to Namibia, but nego-

tiations seem to have stalled (Burke and Oltermann

2016). In 2017, the Deutsches Historische Museum

in Berlin staged an important and critical exhibition,

“German Colonialism: Fragments and Present,” on the

history of German colonialism. The excellent catalogue

(Deutsches Historisches Museum 2016) includes

articles on the issue of the Herero genocide.

2 Ironically, at the time the Deutsche Bank itself

was defendant in an American court case in which the

Herero claimed reparations (Cooper 2006). This article

argues that such reparation payments are unlikely to

be granted. For an account that argues in favor of the

culpability of colonial crimes committed before 1948,

see Anderson 2005; for a more sociological discussion

of the Herero reparations claim see Bargueño 2012.

3 https://www.bundesregierung.de/Content/DE/

Mitschrift/Pressekonferenzen/2015/07/2015-07-10-regpk.

html; accessed 15 June 2017.

4 The most important studies on Black Box include

the exhibition catalogue (Villaseñor 2005), as well as

Hagström-Ståhl (2010), Coumans (date), and Gelden-

huys (2007). An early but comprehensive overview of

Kentridge’s art was published by Godby (1999). The

most authoritative statement on Kentridge’s signature

technique of the drawings for projection is Krauss

(2000), but other substantial discussions of his tech-

niques exist, for instance in Krauss et al. (2012) and

Garb and Bradley (2016). There are several insightful

articles on the significance of Kentridge’s conceptu-

alization of history: Dubow and Rosengarten (2004),

Rothberg (2012). In addition, several catalogues

include essays on Kentridge’s work: Cameron et al.

(1999), McCrickard (2012). In 2012, the artist gave the

Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University

(Kentridge 2014).

5 Krauss’s contention with the spectacularization

of memory in the process of South Africa’s Truth and

Reconciliation Committee retakes Hannah Arendt’s

evaluation of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, 1961. 6 This debate between Siegfried Kracauer and

Walter Benjamin occurred in various publications and

various media throughout the 1920s and 1930s (see

Hansen 2012).

7 It is likely that the concentration camps afforded

the collection of skulls for scientific study, a subject

broached below (Kössler 2015:277).

8 The question to what extent colonial genocides

such as the Herero genocide have paved the way

towards the Holocaust are currently debated among

German historians. Hannah Arendt was the first to

posit that Germany’s totalitarian regime had its origins

in the peculiarities of German imperialism but the

terms of debate have since shifted. The discussion

seems to move toward comparative analysis of colonial

regimes, within and across empires, especially with

regard to settler colonies (Kössler 2012:237). The

literature on the subject is vast and mostly in German.

Amongst the most recent contributions to the debate

are Steinmetz (2007); Moses 2008); Zimmerer and

Zeller (2008); Parraudin and Zimmerer (2010); Sarkin

(2011); Lanbehn and Salama (2011); Zimmerer (2011);

and Kössler (2015).

9 Published in Germany during the genocide, this

image recalls the early twentieth-century lynching

photographs that were circulated as postcards for the

purpose of national education in the United States

(Apel 2004).

10 Decades later, this scientific research fed into

the eugenics of Nazi ideology. However, it should be

noted that continuities in German history such as those

alleged between the Herero genocide and the Holocaust

are severely contested in German historiography. The

decapitation of colonial subjects and the use of their

skulls for racial science has been the subject of extensive

research (Dubow 1995; Legassick and Rassool 2000;

Crais and Scully 2009; Lalu 2009; Roberts 2013).

11 Removed from their performance in Black Box,

the still images on display in the gallery space enable

the public to scrutinize the process of their production.

Black Box is indebted to Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, understood as the technique that renders the object

as “historical”—constructed by human beings—and

enables the observers to think about its production

(Jameson 1998:51).

12 Van Alphen (2014:235) pointedly suggests that

archival art verifies “the structures through which

knowledge is lost or transmitted.”

13 In his Norton lectures, Kentridge reveals the

origins of some of the effects used in Black Box. The

spring used for the Herero woman is a spiral egg whisk

Kentridge purchased in Paris. For a flat skull, which

explodes on stage, Kentridge used the struts and bolts

of a Meccano set.

14 Although relatively little information can be

gleaned from archival sources about the Herero experi-

ence of the genocide, anthropological research has

demonstrated that these laments remember the flight

from German prosecution (Alnaes 1989:274).

15 As the curator of an exhibition on shadow plays

notes, Black Box shares with puppet theaters the expo-

sure of its own construction (Colombo 2008).

16 On “recognition”, see William Kentridge’s view in

In Praise of Shadows (2014), where he expands on this

notion and differentiates it from other forms of percep-

tion and cognition. An analysis of Kentridge’s concept

of recognition is provided by Saltzman (2006); see also

McCrickard (2012:ch. 3).

17 Kentridge’s rhino references Albrecht Dűrer’s

first European representation of a rhinoceros (Rhinoc- eros, 1515), as well as Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s Rhinoceros (1749), and Pietro Longhi’s Exhibition of a Rhinoceros at Venice (1751). McCrickard (2012:109) suggests

the rhino also invokes the play Rhinocéros (1959) by

Eugène Ionesco, which critiques conformity and the

rise of mass political movements before World War II.

18 In her work on shadows and silhouettes in

contemporary art, Saltzman (2006:53) has astutely

observed that “such forms establish an ethics of rep-

resentation that is predicated on a logic spectrality, on

marking precisely that which cannot be represented,

yet making it somehow, legible.” Their lack of legibility

does not imply an absence of reference, even though

the historical referentiality of these ghosts is rather

ambiguous (cf. McCrickard 2012:109).

19 Here, one can invoke Kentridge’s words used as

epithet: “We have reached a point where all destina-

tions, all bright lights, arouse mistrust. The light at the

end of the tunnel turns too quickly into the interroga-

tor’s spotlight” (2014:11).

20 Kentridge considers this movement between

original object and viewfinder of the camera as pivotal

to his work: “A sheet of paper on the wall of the studio.

A camera in the center of the room. A walk between

the camera and the wall. Altering the drawing,

walking to the camera, recording the alteration. The

studio becomes a machine for the alteration of time”

(2014:90, see also p. 95).

21 Kentridge himself states that “Transformation,

metamorphosis is of course the bread and butter of

animation” (2014:146). On animation of the archive,

see de Jong (2016).

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